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Accidentally liking an old photo while stalking someone remains a universal digital nightmare, and Instagram has confirmed that it cannot fully protect users from the awkward aftermath
In a reel published on 28 July, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri addressed the long-standing dilemma, explaining why quickly unliking a post fails to completely erase the digital paper trail.
While the platform immediately removes the in-app alert from the recipient's activity feed when a user unlikes a photo, it cannot retract push notifications that have already appeared on a smartphone's lock screen.
If the account owner has push notifications enabled on their device, your username will remain displayed for them to see
"When you do like someone's photo, we send them a notification to let them know, but there are actually two types of notifications — there's the phone notification, and there's the Instagram notification," Mosseri said.
"When you unlike that photo, we can delete that Instagram notification, but we cannot delete that phone notification; it will still say on their lock screen that you liked that photo." He elaborated that tapping the lingering alert leads the recipient nowhere inside the application because the underlying link has been scrubbed
"If we could delete that phone notification, we would, but we can't," he added.
The notification breakdown comes as Meta continues testing new privacy controls and subscription-based tools across regional markets
The platform is currently experimenting with a premium feature in select countries that enables subscribers to watch Instagram Stories anonymously without appearing on viewer lists.
However, until similar privacy safeguards exist for standard grid feeds, cautious scrolling remains the only reliable defence against accidental profile notifications.
